Visitors can see how the garden has been redesigned to include plants that New Jersey’s native people would have grown or gathered in the wild and those that enslaved Africans would have cultivated for their own use and for the local market, as well as the herbs and vegetables grown in the gardens of English colonists. Throughout the 300-year-old house are hands-on displays and posters that show what daily life was like in the 1700s for both the wealthy Trent family and for the people held in bondage who worked there. What did these residents of the house eat, how did they dress, where did they sleep, what did they do for fun or relaxation, how were children cared for?

 The Visitor Center displays what archaeology on the grounds has revealed about the lives of indigenous people from artifacts left behind and how Trent’s involvement in the slave trade of the 1700s connected him with many other wealthy and prominent colonists. Watch a re-enactment of the dilemma that Mary Trent faced when her husband suddenly died without a will in 1724 and a video illustrating with maps how the neighborhood around the Trent House went from orchards and farms to factories and workers’ houses to the parking lots and highways surrounding it today.

For more information, visit https://www.williamtrenthouse.org.